I just watched the new Budweiser commercial for July 4 this year and I think it is genius. They used story to do good as well as make money. Lately I’ve been disturbed by mechanistic applications of story, but this? This is big picture, risky, embedded with big T Truth and I hope it does what it seems to have been designed to do.

Budweiser invites liberals and conservatives to remember who they are and why they are here, and to have a damn beer fer crissakes. The common good intentions of left and right are symbolized by the conservative cues framing the family of the veteran and his daughter as obviously conservative they add an even heavier handed cues about liberal Hollywood to characterize Adam Driver. Then they dissolve their different POVs with the shared tragedy of both men being wounded before deployment and dealing with pain and survivors guilt.

I try to imagine… what was the dialogue in the conference room when they made the decision

“Should we do it?”

“It’s risky.”

“You are f—ing idealists.”

“It tested well.”

“Screw it, we’re going to do it.”

Of course they tested this ad. I admit preliminary the comments I’ve read are accusatorial jabs from die hard haters from both sides. But I hope that over time, the idea of just sitting down and having a beer comparing what we care about most…will bring some sanity to the current political arena.

I stopped flying United Airlines a while back. I remember the first time I felt harassed on a United flight. I asked for help lifting my backpack into the overhead. The flight attendant’s lip curled slightly as she said, “I am primarily here for your safety” with a tone that added the unspoken message, “so don’t treat me like a servant.” At the time, I assumed her anger was due to a snowballing series of unpleasant events and my assumptive request felt arrogant to her. It was not immaterial that she was black and I am white. I am active in racial reconciliation work in the Deep South so if race was part of it that makes sense to me.

But I see another pattern fueling tension between United employees and customers that recently led to man-handling a customer. And I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Like all reality, there are predictable polarities in business – particularly service businesses. One big paradox is:

If the customer is always right… are employees still our most important asset?

I’m guessing United and other airlines adopted the “primarily here for your safety” perspective as a strategy to increase the dignity employees retain if/when customers are unkind. A guardian gets more dignity than a servant so this metaphor shifted the pendulum of empathetic perspective toward employees. And that’s wonderful. We should be taking better care of employees. This has been a long term strategy for United and it explains the CEOs initial solidarity with employees.

Yet the unintended consequence of increasing empathy for employees by characterizing them as guardians first, hosts second, simply shifts the burden to manage physical safety and psychological safety. Attempts to mechanize empathy seem to shift the burden by de-humanizing yet another context where personal attention matters. We are drowning beneath a tsunami of decisions chasing numbers at the expense of personal relationships and it is turning out exactly as you might imagine.

Systems designed to ensure physical safety frequently create a lack of psychological safety. Think Nurse Ratched. Or TSA (much better now). Systems and routines designed to minimize the situational nature of empathy only prevent the situational nature of empathy. Even hospitals enter a dangerous phase when numbers become more important that people. And it’s not restricted to a focus on safety. Last week, I felt harassed by endless phone calls from my car dealer strong arming me into completing a customer satisfaction survey. These poor people seem more incentivized to score satisfaction than deliver it. Competition for good numbers can turn good people into little nazis. We need two forms of measurement: numbers are great but qualitative measures matter too.

Numbers games teach winners to shift expenses and burdens onto losers – in United’s case – customers. Emphasizing physical safety (measurable) over psychological safety (qualitative) builds autocratic systems that enforce preventative routines based on worst case scenario, root cause analysis, and the ethic of “better safe than sorry.” We can do better. The human need for empathy (and the consequences of empathy denied) will never be designed out of real life. So why not embrace the paradox, pursue safety and good numbers while remembering that the best way to get empathy is to give it.

In 2004 I introduced my ideas about story-thinking to a bunch of design engineers who responded “no, no, that’s design-thinking.” So I fell in love with design thinking…genuises like Dan Lockton (101 patterns for behavior change), Jan Jursa and UX Storytellers (free ebook with personal UX stories) create designs that are stories. Perhaps story thinking and design thinking are not an exact match but the steps of find/share/refine from UX, Agile, and Scrum sources are delightfully nonlinear (story) compared to the decision routines I learned from management by objective techniques (i.e. SMART goals) and I like the conversations of UX people. They ignite the imagination to pursue goals we can’t yet see.

I have an issue with the UX term “cognitive bias” because EMOTION should be in there somewhere and “bias” makes humans sound like stupid cows who might follow a cattle chute wherever it goes. Even cow chutes can fail until a designer understands the stories cows tell themselves (see Temple Grandin). Human patterns of interpretation can utilize rational tools but our patterns irrevocably reflect the DNA of physical experience and emotional reasoning. Every “cognitive bias” makes as much sense as any stereotype makes sense. It shouldn’t be universally applied, but it comes from an organic place. I’m happy to know that Dan Ariely says his term “predictably irrational” refers to the idea that it is irrational to think you can predict your own behavior. It is not a blanket disdain for these patterns of behavior. Emotional reasoning is and forever will be more powerful than rational decision making and I see that as a good thing because our future will be much better when we learn to blend emotions like empathy, compassion and love into our ratios.

Before demand for content reduced storytelling to a sequence of linear explanations and numbered bullets, it was mostly taught in person.

Learning storytelling in a group from an experienced storyteller provides an experiential sense of story that can’t be captured with a set of procedural instructions. There are great courses out there. We can learn a lot online…but if we want to understand something as deeply human as storytelling its ideal for humans to interact with other humans.

Here’s why: A story blends emotional, visual, kinesthetic and rational reasoning routines without separating them. Personal stories illuminate insights that are specific to a situation’s people, complexity, texture and relationships. A vibrant true story delivers a hologram of culture, nature, nurture, space and time from an embodied human point of view: WAY more information than a story formated via a hunt and peck search for hero, quest, obstacle, helper and journey.

The job of a storyteller is two-fold. First, a storyteller notices the emotional, visual, and kinesthetic patterns that produce perceptions (i.e. what makes some facts feel more important than other facts) and interpret conclusions (I “know” him therefore he is more trustworthy). Second, a storyteller must be able to re-create this perceptual/emotional point of view so others share the insights and the feelings as if they were physically there.

Yes, any story that provides your listeners with a vicarious experience of your facts in time and space makes your facts feel more “real” …with all the benefits of that, but to me, the real value of storytelling is the way it allows us to aggregate contexts and shift perspectives so we make better decisions. When rational objective reasoning is allowed to over-rule subjective story reasoning we end up with projects that should’ve worked, but didn’t because emotions and perceptions rule human reality.

More than a set of tool to persuade, story-finding and storytelling skills increase the variety and quality of scenarios we can imagine to produce the results we seek – sometimes revealing even better goals in the process. Any story that narrates a relevant “Significant Emotional Event” (without some imposed structure) helps us S.E.E. important patterns, better test prototypes, and understand user experiences.

Designing cattle chute stories/interfaces that only lead to pre-determined conclusions is not engaging it is coercion. Narrating stories with the priority of understanding (not controlling) true human experiences releases listener conclusions to be creative and more meaningful to you both. It means showing faith in your listeners (always appreciated) and sharing responsibility for mutually creative interpretations and actions. There is no “right story.” If you look for the perfect story you sacrifice the process of mindful attention to what is, in favor of what you want to see. Both are valid…but I’m thinking we could all do a better job of understanding what is.

So to all my UX colleagues, please don’t let your understanding of storytelling get distorted with contrivances created to package and sell storytelling advice. User experiences with emotion and unpredictability intact are too valuable to the process of innovation to be reduced to fit existing categroies. Be bold.

The Story Factor is now updated and available on audible as an audiobook. Fifteen years of perspective and a genius editor (Stephen Brewer) helped me cut it from 13 hours to 5 hours flat. Producers Jay and Michelle from Beyond Measure Media took me into a real studio and monitored sound quality and my energy levels to meet their high standards. I hope you like it.

In the Steve Jobs tradition, I thought I’d “connect the dots” between the obsessive research (you have no idea), designed interventions, and no charge experiments I’d run on any group of volunteers that would let me and the journey that lead to the original The Story Factor back in 2001. I was still in grad school when I attended my first National Storytelling Festival in 1994, but it was a long time I realized how important storytelling is or learned enough to describe storytelling as a type of “intervention.”

In fact, The Story Factor was the third book in a series of three intense periods of research and experimentation, design and testing that began with my search to increase authentic collaboration. In 1994 my mentor Dr. Jim Farr (founding contributor to Center for Creative Leadership) taught me how to deliver learning experiences using transformational self awareness techniques that improved leadership skills by blending soul-deep examination of intent and beliefs in a way that clarified their definition of success and for some, redirected the traectory of their life. So… the “team building” tools at that time just seemed terribly superficial in comparison to my experiences running these workshops. I was certain I could find a leverage point for self-awareness that would shift the negative emotions wasting time and resources with phrases like “not my job,” or avoided questions with “who wants to know?” I set out to identify what patterns work against team building: “When, where, how do we reject collaboration and why?”

For instance, in meetings, subtle messages like a stiff tone of voice, raised eyebrows, or strategically insincere agreements erode trust and decrease our desire to collaborate, share information, support, or even to save the game player from drowning down the line. So the first book, Territorial Games named ten micro-behaviors or repeated patterns from hundreds of executive’s true stories I had recorded and transcribed. Most answered first with metaphors like turf war, back stabber, silo or the thank-god-its-a-metaphor “pissing contest.” I’d point out the metaphor was not literally true and then ask “so what actually happened?” These true stories revealed a subterranean language of inclusion and exclusion understood across all cultures. My theory was that evolution designed us with insincts a/k/a emotions that compel us to acquire and protect territory: no longer hunting grounds and watering holes but the intangible territory that helps us survive and thrive: information, relationships, and status. Therefore a rational, cognitive desire to collaborate was insufficient without vital emotions like trust and faith.

So AMACOM published Territorial Games and give it away as the 1998 membership gift for joining American Management Association. Clients hired me to help plan mergers, de-escalate infighting, and unlock impasse. The games worked best with funny stories that neutralized defensiveness and increased self awareness. I provided an alternative story for the “who started it?” question to decrease assumptions of malicious or negligence, which is that these emotional behaviors are hardwired by evolution for survival. “If you play these games, it’s okay, its not your fault…but guess what…those people who you think deserve payback? It’s not their fault either.” This new story increased self-compassion and a reason to monitor behaviors that sent unconscious signals to back off. For those who are doing it on purpose – the list of games denied them plausible excuses.

Still, there were long term turf wars that would never go away until all the old stories were exposed to each other in a way that created a bigger story than the us/them causing problems. Back in grad school (1994) I had written my masters thesis on “dialogue,” drawing from organizational learning, systems theory, social psychology, In 1996 I got ahold of David Bohm’s “On Dialogue” and continued my enduring study of anything from Ed Schein on group process. Armed with this understanding, and the crafty little tricks I learned from my mentor, I wrote A Safe Place for Dangerous Truths: Using Dialogue to Overcome Fear and Distrust. It was an ambitious design for training a group (60 max, although it worked for 90 at least once) to a.) self-regulate by generating personal and group strategies for pre-empting what I’ve come to call “going to the bad place” and b.) shifting expectations to accomodate the feelings of uncertainty and sheer frustration of stretching your brain wide enough to see that everyone has a piece of the same elephant. In that book is a shapter on Storytelling as one of the “seven basic facilitator skills.” This is the first time I used simple drawings for common group patterns instead of words. It was a very successful form of visual storytelling even if I was not yet aware of it.

Everytime I facilitated dialogue I took notes to capture as close to a verbatim transcript as I could. It turned out the “faulty assumptions” groups decided to abandon were basically stories. And every insight a group dsicovered by examining their bigger story required could not spread from that group to the organization without it’s own stories and metaphors. I realized l was an awkward fish swimming in an ocean of stories. I wrote the The Story Factor to map the currents.

Fifteen years later, I took time to revisit, update and edit the maps in The Story Factor, producing this audiobook as a result. Let me know what you think!

Let’s pretend I’m Eve and you are Adam. Don’t worry about what we are or aren’t wearing. So in my hand is this apple, and with it the secret to finding good stories. All yours, free of charge. But, before you take a bite I have to warn you; there is a big downside. This apple is from the tree of knowledge (yep, that one) and each bite can be as difficult as it is joyful. Tiny bites are okay, but tiny bites mean tiny difficulties and tiny joys.

As a general rule, I harbor deep suspicions against anyone who says they have “the answer” to anything. Storytelling took off around the same time my book The Story Factor was published. Probably a coincidence. I wasn’t the only exploding with ideas at the Jonesborough storytelling festival in 1994. In 1998 and 1999 I wasn’t the only one running experiments and writing about stories. But there wasn’t a big crowd, either. I felt complete freedom to explore storytelling without restraint and I had more than enough arrogance to assume I understood what I thought I understood. I mainly sought advice from traditional storytellers although my questions came from psychology, group dynamics, and teaching self-awareness workshops.

It was a lot of work…but I felt pure joy writing about storytelling (except for the editing part, editing sucks). Back then stories were allowed to go anywhere and come from anywhere. It felt like exploring a natural wilderness of surprises. There was no internet to harsh my buzz with numbered lists and so I mapped what felt natural to map, connecting my own dots, for my own reasons: I had a shiny messiah complex and I was out to save the world – share storytelling for good, not evil, and all that.

Anyway, it’s 20 years later and you can’t swing a dead cat in a coffee shop without hitting a storyteller. The neighborhood looks a lot different than it did. I see the equivalent of fancy cars and big malls, secret clubs and Disney story wonderlands with hefty entry fees. My friends call it the “storytelling industrial complex.” Do any of them have “the answer?”

Honestly? Some do. I still like my six stories and I’ve felt “this is it! several times since then. But after twenty years, the “this is it!” moments run together. So…I needed one big thing, something pivotal, basic, primitive, and organic to help organize my thoughts and zero in on really good stories.

It’s not surprising I found my new “unifying theory of story” listening to Joseph Campbell. I was two blocks from my house walking Lucy, when through my earbuds I heard Joseph Campbell tell Bill Moyers that he had revised his opinion that the purpose of myth was to create meaning. His tone got lively as he explained that maybe creation stories prompted it, but in his revised opinion the purpose of myth is to chart what it is to “feel truly alive.”

Who cares about a love story if it doesnt make you feel more alive? Horror stories aren’t interesting unless they remind us how precious life is or validate that you are not alone in your fear, a good mystery offers shared wonder that produces a visceral and physiological change in heart rate, etc. I now think this is the common denominator in all good stories. They remind us we are alive.

The secret to great storytelling is: does this story make me/us feel more alive? It is as simple and as difficult as that. This aliveness seems to happen when opposites touch: life/death, good/evil, rich/poor, dangerous/safe, dark grey/light grey, love/emptiness, beauty/ugliness and the rest. So contrast is key to creating a narrative frame, but there is a big difference between a story that should work and one that does.

Joseph Campbell spoke of the knights on their quest for the Holy Grail “If a path exists in the forest, don’t follow it, for though it took someone else to the Grail, it will not take you there, because it is not your path.”

My advice? I recommend you go take a big juicy bite out of a real apple. Let the juice run down your chin, look at the red, green, brown and white of it and think about what else makes you feel truly alive. Then look for stories that make you feel like that: more alive. When you find it, that’s a good story.